After Jesus had been taken from the Garden of Gethsemane and brought to the High Priest, Jesus was questioned: "are you the Messiah?" To His answer one of the guards struck Him on the Face. It is the first recorded blow that Jesus received. The Shroud shows that the right cheek has a swelling, the result of some blow at some time during the long ordeal that Jesus had to undergo before the High Priest, Herod and Pilate.

As daylight comes Jesus, already condemned to death by Jewish Court, is taken to Pilate. Pilate finds that Jesus is the victim of religious fanaticism and searches for a way to save Him. Unable to have Jesus to compromise in I-Es position, Pilate finds it expedient to have Jesus scourged, it seems in the hope of releasing Him.

St. John writes: "Pilate's next move was to take Jesus and have him scourged " (John 19: 1) The scourging entailed that the victim would be stripped of his clothing, tied to a pillar or to a rope hanging from the ceiling. Normally one man would do the whipping, but sometimes there were two men one from each side of the victim. As the Shroud shows, in the case of Jesus there were two soldiers doing the scourging.

As one looks at the back of the man on the Shroud one will notice a number of black spots from the shoulders all the way down to the legs. They are bruises caused by the scourging. The bruises are so detailed that it is possible to reconstruct the type of scourge which was used.

Jesus must have been standing and bound to a rope hanging from the ceiling or to a column with his hands tied above Him (or tied to a column). We may assume that during the scourging Our Lord was completely naked. From the angle of the bruises, we may conclude that there were two executioners. The one on the right, cruel, because he struck Jesus very severely on the shoulders and legs; while the one on the left, maybe a little more sympathetic, struck Jesus on the shoulders only, and the blows were less severe. Dr. Barbet has counted over 120 such bruises all over the body.